The game of poker has been around for nearly two centuries. It was a popular games spread throughout the Mississippi River in the 1800s. The game since then has become the most popular card game today.
With the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, being able to play poker against other players worldwide was thought to be impossible. A very smart man, and great poker player, Mike Caro envisioned that one day online poker would become a reality. People thought he was crazy, but on January 1, 1998 the first real money hand was played on Planet Poker. The only game offered by Planet Poker was $3/$6 limit and there were not many players.
Seeing the success of this new concept, other poker rooms were established. Paradise Poker was one of the first to challenge the marketplace when they opened in 1999 and they soon thereafter became the industry leader. Paradise Poker was started by a group of Canadian college students and offered a more games such as Omaha, Seven Card Stud along with the popular Texas Hold’em. They also offered a variety of stakes making it more popular to a larger audience of people. At the time these sites were still fairly basic and were among the few smaller poker rooms available online.
It wasn’t until 2001 that two major sites were launched; Poker Stars and Party Poker, which today are still two of the largest poker rooms. They were the first to offer tournaments in addition to the cash games other sites were already running. Both sites had done very well since opening, but online poker was still not very popular. Poker was not all over the TV like it is today.
In 2003 Party Poker started spending millions of dollars on television ads. Party Poker became a huge hit and at the time accounted for roughly half of the population of online poker players. At the same time, Pokerstars had its own idea to gain popularity.
Pokerstars offered a satellite tournament to the World Series of Poker with a buy-in of $40. Chris Moneymaker won this small tournament to go onto the WSOP where in a field or 839 poker players he took 1st place winning $2.5 million dollars. It was his first live tournament. This Cinderella story along with television ads prompted online pokers popularity to explode!
The revenues of these top sites more than tripled and new sites saw entry into the industry. In 2004 Full Tilt Poker announced its arrival and has since grown to be one of the most popular online poker rooms. The same year, the poker room, Paradise Poker, was sold for $297.5 million.
In 2005 the buzz about online poker had hit its peak. Hundreds of thousands of players were playing everyday and the companies were literally raking in the cash. Yahoo reportedly was interested in purchasing Party Poker, but they were too far behind.
In 2006, with lawmakers angry over the obscene profits being made and not taxed on, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed. This act entailed making funding or accepting funding from an online gambling site illegal. The online poker community was in complete chaos. The sites were not ready for these new laws.
Party Poker was the first company to react. As a public company, with shareholders to protect, it could not expose itself to this huge risk to its business. So it cut off all US players at a stroke, wiping out over 80 percent of its customers and sending share prices plummeting. Several of the other poker rooms such as Paradise Poker would soon follow not accepting US players.
With an abundance of players looking for a new poker room, anyone willing to take US players stood to make a killing. Private companies were only putting themselves at risk. Pokerstars and Full Tilt have always been private companies and they continue to reap the profits from US poker players until recently.
The US Government has been taking down domains of some of the largest sportsbooks and online poker sites around.
The following poker rooms and sportsbooks are no longer accepting US players:
Betus
Bookmaker
Full Tilt Poker
Pokerstars
There are still a lot of great online poker sites that accept us players and will not get shut down anytime soon:
Players Only
